Lughnasa Waxing Honey Extraction Room
Since March I’ve driven home at 8 pm, each Sunday, from Tai Chi at the corner of Hennepin and Franklin. As March receded and April arrived, then May and June, the evening drive had light, then light in abundance, with the sun setting well after I got home. Now we are in Lughnasa, a full six weeks past the Summer Solstice. This last Sunday night the sun had begun to fall behind the trees as I headed toward Highway 252. The long downward slide toward the Winter Solstice is well underway, the days growing shorter and the nights longer.
This is my time, now, the season bent toward darkness and cold even while the heat of summer continues to swell the fruits of the garden. I can already feel the movement inward and down, the contemplative months reaching out from the future, beckoning my soul.
Once the harvest begins in earnest, which it did here in July with the garlic crop, the gardening year moves toward senescence, ripening proceeds the coming of brown withered stalks and leaves turning already to dust. Nature puts the bounty just before the fallow time. It is the fallow time though, the time after the sensuality of seed fertility has yielded to summer and produced crops, crops that finish the plants purpose for that season at least, in many cases forever, that leaves room for the imagination, writing its dreams on stubbled fields, carving its fantasies in clouds pushed down from the north, opening the heart to its own rhythm.
(Allison found this Van Gogh drawing. It even has the hint of melancholy the season brings in its train.)
